THE NEW YORKER 35 ley hadn't said it, the family might get mad. I cut out "as Benchley once called him" and was back where I had been on August 2, 1949-could it still be 1949? I rr was three dawns later that 1 woke up with a brand-new start. 1 had had a frightful dream, and its details were sharp In my memory. An as- sistant editor of the Times Book Re- view had brought my copy of the piece on Benchley to his superior. "1 just caught this in time, Chief," he said. "Thurber has made a careless mistake. He refers to Max as 'the Comparable Max.'" "What should it be?" asked the chief. The young editor gave his superior a superior smile. "It should be 'the Incomparable Max,' " he cried gleefully. "Everybody knows that." "Certainly," said the chief. "1 just wasn't thinking. Change it." The as- sistant seized an enormous blue pencil and 1 woke up with the brand-new start. My unconscious mind had given me a fresh worry. The learned John McNulty has pointed out that you can't get certain words into newspapers; they . . always change "pother" to "bother," " b h " " h " d " fl . " at os to pat os, an aIr to "flare." They would add an "in" to "comparable" the moment they saw it. 1 lay there in bed and remembered what the Times Book Review had done to George Bernard Shaw in an article of his it printed four years ago. I got up, tiptoed past my wife's bed, and, two hours later, found the Shaw essay in the Times Book Review for Novem- ber 18, 1 945. The editors of the review had made him say this: "1 was con- firmed in my peculiar doctrine that a point will be reached in human mental development when the pleasure taken in brain work by St. Thomas Aquinas and the Webbs (and by saints and philosophers generally) will intensify to a chronic ecstasy surpassing that now induced momentarily by the sexual organism . .." Here, in a deft and desperate assault on meaning, the Times had taken the "in" it was going to add to my "comparable," spelled it back- ward, and stuck it into the great man's key word, thus savIng the American Thunderer from an insupportable em- barrassment. "What's the matter now?" asked my wife when I crept back to bed. "1 was just thinking," 1 said. "1 was just thinking that the Times will be sure to take the first 'e' out of 'Adeler.' Nobody is named Adeler. Everybody is named Adler." "Not everybody," she said sleepily. "Well, nearly everybody," I said. " E b d . h T ' " very 0 y In t e zmes, anyway. The male wren abruptly began his day of song: "Adler, Adler, Adler. Stet, stet, stet." I F you would care to have the Com- parable Max, it is yours, but 1 warn you, in the argot of professional book collectors, that it is not in mint condi- tion. It is dog-eared, it is foxed, it is shaken, and its spine is broken. -JAMES THURBER . We reserve the right to refuse admit- tance to any child that is too unruly to 'cause confusion in the school.-A pplication card of a Birmingham (Ala.) kindergar- ten. You say you're running a school?